MS CLAKE IS DOING A PHD WITH LUKE KENNARD AT BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, ON THE FEMINIST ABSURD IN AMERICAN AND BRITISH POETRY JENNA CLAKE I...

Sunday, 5 October 2014

GUEST REVIEW: BAXTER ON NEPVEU

Jamie Baxter reviews

The Major Verbs

by Pierre Nepveu

The Major Verbs is the translation of
Pierre Nepveu’s award winning collection Les Verbes Majeurs, translated by
Donald Winkler. The collection consists of three sequences: one focused on a
woman, a night cleaner, on the subway, another considers a group of stones on a
table and the third is dedicated to the poet’s parents. The book ends with a
poem written in the America southwest.

The first section examines the woman on
the subway, her life, her job, her place in the world as well as the poet’s own
loneliness while attempting to connect with a stranger without interacting with
them.

The
woman asleep in the subway

trails
into dawn

her
nightlong chores.

The first three lines of the collection
shows the effortless tenderness poet and translator have succeeded in creating
in the first section of the book. Nepveu paints the office-scape where the
cleaner works as bleak and at times frightening with ‘fax machine’s sudden
stuttering’ and ‘ravenous vacuum cleaner maw’ where ‘chill winds come from
unseen ducts’. The poet patiently shows us this woman’s unseen toil after the
working masses have left whom she does not speak to ‘not even to ask
directions’. But the section does not end with this intimate portrait but
interrogates the poet’s relationship to the woman noting,

..I’ve
only the ardour

of
the ancient troubadour

who
on horseback implored the void

to
be beautiful and to become a poem

But the Nepveu is never in danger of
descending into hysteria and speaks in the woman’s voice to say, ‘I didn’t see
you’ and even more adeptly, ‘even if I had/ you would be absence itself and
forgetfulness’.

The second section is ‘Stones on a
Table’ and these stones are the direct consideration of the first few poems in
the sequence where Nepveu probes these simple objects to find something
elusive,

I
sensed there a refusal,

a
stellar eternity

holding
itself cold and dense.

In the following poems the stones become
a mere presence, a prop in an unhappy relationship, ‘On the table between the
two of us/the stones weigh heavy’. The poet continually sets sweeping statement
against the most delicate of details which gives these poems, and indeed the
whole book, an exceptional breadth and depth which is hard not to marvel at as
well as enjoy.The third section of the book is full of loss, punctuated with
haunting and images such as, ‘I see time/unstitch in their eyes’. The poet
accuses his mother, ‘she let/ the television’s cathode glow/ penetrate her
through and through,’ giving the anger that grief often contains a poetic
outlet. Nepveu masterfully succeeds at creating a book with a life of its own
which unflinchingly examines every aspect of life, leaving you with a new,
beautiful way of describing it all.

Jamie Baxter is 25, living
and working in London and after graduating from Durham University. He has been
published in Astronaut and The
Delinquent and on the Cadaverine and Pomegranate.